The Air Force Academy is restructuring to provide a more integrated education for cadets. 

Dean of Faculty Brig. Gen. James Valpiani envisions a core curriculum for all cadets that brings together areas of study so that cadets don’t learn about critical topics in silos.

He wants to ensure artificial intelligence isn’t isolated from ethics and civic responsibility isn’t isolated from warfighting duties, among other integration.

The new school of Integrated General Studies will oversee the work that will be focused on the 90 credit hours of core classes that all cadets are required to study.

While many colleges have schools that oversee a set of related departments, Valpiani described the new general studies school as a novel academy idea in terms of its breadth and scope. 

“The faculty responsible for those core curriculum, will live together every day, thinking about how to drive integration across their outcomes, across the day-to-day curriculum that they teach, across the research programs and the hands-on projects that they develop for the cadets,” Valpiani said. 

The model is meant to bring together faculty working in the liberal arts, science, technology, engineering and math, as well as those within AI and in warfighting, he said. 

While not every cadet will go on to be an engineer, he wants to ensure they are exposed to engineering and scientific processes, so they develop good judgment, he said. 

The new Integrated General Studies school is one of several that will be stood up under an imminent reorganization and a name change for the academic side of the academy. The transition to the Academic Wing structure will happen Aug. 5.

The other new schools will be the School of Integrated Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Integrated Basic Sciences and the School of Integrated Engineering Sciences. These schools will be focused on designing, delivering and assessing majors at the academy and furthering scholarship in individual areas, he explained. 

The schools will also provide a layer of leadership between the school’s 20 departments and Valpiani’s office. 

In his role, Valpiani will serve not only as the dean of faculty but also as the school’s provost and commander of the Academic Wing, ensuring good order and discipline from a military perspective. 

Deans will lead the new schools and take on some of the governance and academic workloads from the department heads. Those people have already been selected from existing faculty in leadership. 

While the new management structure will be introduced next week, the new curriculum will take time to develop.

The academy has started working groups involving nearly 100 people across its 20 departments to work on integrating the curriculum. Those groups will meet through the fall and spring. 

New integrated courses may start in the spring and the new integrated curriculum could start in full next year, Valpiani said, although the timeline could get pushed back. 

The school is not currently planning to eliminate or add majors or minors as part of the work; nor will it consolidate academic departments. 

The academy also expects to bring on new staff to support the effort, although the institution as a whole will not add positions. 

“We’re very excited about the opportunity to hire additional faculty and staff who will make it possible for us to advance that integrated curriculum development and execution,” Valpiani said.

The academy lost staff members, including instructors and doctorate-level professors, last year through natural attrition and as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred resignation and early retirement programs offered to civilians. 

The new interdisciplinary approach has great potential, and will likely allow for a sweeping review of the core curriculum, said retired Air Force Lt. Col. Tony Aretz, who spent his military career at the Air Force Academy before pursuing a career in college administration. He led two small civilian colleges. 

“It’s a good signal the academy is willing to make some significant change,” he said. But it has to go beyond assembling additional administrators and reach cadets in the classroom.

The academy requires 90 credit hours as part of its core required curriculum, which is higher than other schools. For example, the University of Colorado Denver requires 34-40 semester hours. 

With so many courses and so many demands on cadets’ time, courses sometimes can’t dive deep into their subjects, he explained.

But when students have time to really explore a subject through a paper or a project, it can lead to greater retention. Such an approach can have an interdisciplinary appraoch.

For example, in the 1990s Aretz experimented with a class that integrated psychology and English. In that case, the students were required to write about psychology themes.

It’s also likely a good time for a broad curriculum review, Aretz explained, because technology has made some significant changes in the last five years, particularly with the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. 

“It can’t be a seminary on a hill,” he said. 

He also noted that if you want to make changes at the academy, uniformed leaders need to get started early in their tenure because planning and implementing change in higher education takes a long time. For example, it can take a year or longer to hire a new staff member with a doctorate.